Monday, 24 March 2008

Much snow and mould making

I arrived at the workshop this morning after an arduous 2 minute trek through 2 inch deep snow, and this was the scene that greeted me . You can see by the lack of foot prints in the snow that everyone else saw fit to stay in and have a traditional Easter holiday in front of the log fire at home. I hear that the local National Trust property now has a surplus of a 1000 chocolate eggs after the usually well attended 'egg hunt' failed to draw a crowd. I wonder if they will have to wait until the snow melts before they can recover them all?

Anyway, I'd decided todays job would be to make moulds for the details of the coat of arms that were there in multiples. There are 3 crows and 4 wiggly stars. This means that they will each be identical and save me a lot of time sculpting.

Moulds enable indentical casts to be made quickly efficiently. I had already made one star and sculpted the crow the right size for the shield. These were the models from which I made the moulds.

You can see in the picture one of the wiggly stars removed from the mould. This is called a casting and I can make a couple more from it and apply them to the shield. Same with the crows.